The present invention relates to a device for breaking up aggregates of soil or clods as they will hereinafter be denoted.
During the harvesting of potatoes, mechanical devices are used to lift the potatoes out of the ground. With some machines (diggers) the potatoes are merely lifted and then deposited on the ground for manual collection. In others (harvesters) the lifted potatoes are screened and collected. For convenience the term potato harvester will be used herein to denote both forms of machine. Many clods of earth and stones are picked up by the harvester and these can cause damage to the potatoes and must be removed from the harvested crop before it is packed for sale. This requires costly labour and there have been many proposals for removing stones from the soil at or before sowing of the seed potatoes. However, in general the devices of these earlier proposals have been cumbersome and this has meant that the machines have had to be manoeuvred extensively in the headland of the field in order to turn them around for each succeeding run across the field. This causes compaction and damage to the soil structure and the headland is usually rendered unfit for growing potatoes thus losing part of the potential crop from that field. The search for a simple, effective and easily manoeuvred device continues.